Monday, February 22, 2016

indecisiveness is still strong in this one

I still haven't made up my mind on the slave-path-thingy. I just can't seem to be able to make up my mind, I might just postpone the choice to after the beta-testing, actually. In the mean time, I added the random spaceship generator in the game, or rather I "ported" what I had already written a while ago to help a fellow game developer. It works fine, but of course now I need to customize it, so that I can have specific rooms, spawn items, have different types of missions generated, etc. I think I'll have between 3-5 types (sometime it will be simple as "recover the ship log/cargo", or "figure out what happened on the ship", sometimes it will be "blow up the ship", "kill all hostile entities on board" or "find and escort to safety any survivors"), and sometimes have some rare event/items spawn to open up some mini-quests on planets or switch up the gameplay a little. I am unsure if I want the random quests to be infinite or not. On one hand, it would make sure people can always afford to go to Maltik, on the other hand, infinite cash would probably make things boring and mess with the balance.

Anyway, this is it for this week. I'll try to do some more stuff next week, but I am probably going to be busy, so I wouldn't count on it. We'll see how it went when I post next time! ^_^

11 comments:

That sounds really cool. I'm sure that would add quite a bit or replayability to the game. That's a good point about Maltik, but getting to that point in the game, I think most players are capable enough to gather funds in-game that you probably need not worry too much about it. I mean, there's always the casino... or, when times are desperate, I'm sure Celeste can come up with some other jobs that she wouldn't otherwise ever go for... ;P Working retail or something. Get your mind out of the gutter! Lol!

But anyway, it would be an extra way to get money. I figure that, by now, there is already more than enough money to buy everything, but that's something I'll have the testers work on, to figure out how much money on average can I expect players to have and to spend.

Yeah, I could do something like that, for sure, it depends on how balanced the game is. These missions will also require you to buy special equipment for it (since those ships will often be damaged, you'll need a special suit, I think I teased one on Kantor way back then), so I'll have to take that into account too.

Well, the idea is to get some special objectives from a few of the missions (for example, you find a memento from someone who died on the ship, and you try to track down their lover to give it to them), I might get pirates involved too, but I am not sure if I want a proper plot, though, we'll see.

You could just make it that going on these extra quests counts against the timer for ALICE, and adding in traps to lower resistance would thus mean you face a risk/reward scenario with each one.

I.E. do you need the money enough to risk ALICE getting closer to winning or do you skip it in an effort to keep you sanity.

If coding that is murky then you could just transfer the random generator to be Merc Boards on a couple different planets, which each had a different chance of spawning this mission or that mission each time you're there.

I could, but the ALICE timer "ticks" only if your mental resistance is lower than 5, which means careful players could simply go on these missions forever, and get no penalty. I think it's easier to limit the missions in a more permanent way, once I figure out what the best balance might be.

If the randomized stuff has any character driven content linked to it I'd prefer if they could be taken infinitely to account for that, even if rewards are disabled past a certain number. I will otherwise savescum for the character interaction.